A former bank chief at the centre of what is thought to be the world’s largest fraud case has had £4 billion of his wealth ordered into receivership by a London judge in a record court order.
Mukhtar Ablyazov, 47 – who currently lives in an affluent area of Hampstead, North London – is the former head of Kazakhstan’s BTA bank and alleged to be behind a fraud of up to £7.6 billion.
He is being sued in civil actions for £1.27 billion, although he is said to strongly deny all claims against him.
High Court judge Mr Justice Teare ordered £4 billion of his fortune into receivership, after calling him untrustworthy when it came to complying with an asset freezing order and disclosing the entire extent of his assets.
The move follows Mr Ablyazov’s failure to mention his ownership of the sizeable Eurasia Tower in East London’s Docklands.
“An asset the size of Canary Wharf can hardly have slipped his mind,” noted three Appeal Court Judges, who upheld Mr Justice Tear’s court order.
The trial has been delayed, due to lengthy legal proceedings, with legal sources declaring that £4 billion is the biggest sum ever placed into receivership in a case of this kind.
Barrister and author Mark Watson-Gaudy, a visiting professor in corporate finance law at the University of Westminster, said: “Receivership orders and freezing injunctions are the nuclear weapons in the court's armoury to try to ensure judgments bite.
“This is a good day for lawyers, and a bad day for the super-rich.”
BTA’s lawyers claim that losses incurred while Mr Ablyazov was in charge total nearly £7.59 billion, and say that a large sum of bank reserves were diverted to the accounts of companies he secretly owned.
This year a judge froze his assets and ordered him to surrender his passport. On top of this he was told to disclose full details of his wealth to the bank's London lawyers. He is now facing six civil actions against him, which may not finish until 2012.
Among the major Western banks forced to write off billions of dollars invested in BTA is The Royal Bank of Scotland. However, if Mr Ablyazov hands over the money RBS, which is 83 per cent owned by the Government, and the other creditors will share 50 per cent of the clawback.
The founder of a major Kazakhstan opposition party and father of four says he is the innocent victim of political and financial persecution by the former Soviet Union republic's president, Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Mr Ablyazov arrived in Britain in February of last year and has applied for asylum.
Leave a comment